UseIndirectLighting disables SSAO?

[Spock]

Hi,

 

in my recent testings, useindirectlighting completely disabled SSAO during brighter scenes. No matter how far I drove the AO intensity, I couldn't see any difference. Since I'm an AMD user, I'd like to know if this intended or just an AMD related issue.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Spock]

Sorry for bumping my own thread, I did play around with the SSAO SSIL settings a little more. It seems like most ENBs use way too high ILAmount imho and it seems to be the reason why the AO is almost invisible. Something along the line of

 

AOAmount=1.1
AOIntensity=1.3
ILAmount=1.0

 

is what I personally prefer.

Edited January 3, 2016 by Spock

[Aiyen]

Good to hear that you sorted it out. And yes AO is a rather nasty beast to tame. Perhaps you are using a preset that have high contrast, hence the author had to use rather extreme values for the AO to even be noticeable. It is seen before. 

 

Glad that you found some values you enjoy and hopefully have a nicer looking game for it! 

[Spock]

What I have done is using the IL values of a path tracer as reference and setting IL first (AO=0). SSAO_SSIL can never achieve the same lighting accuracy in a rasterizer but it is still decent reference. Then I added AO and going a little moody. It should be fairly realistic within the limitations of a rasterizer. The AO is a little over the top but I think it helps with texture and mesh transitions because in reality they are never as clean as in a game.

 

IL should really only be very visible with plain single colored diffuse textures (such as test setups). It is a very subtle thing in reality, at least for 99% of the materials you see in Skyrim.

 

To my eyes, the lighting looks more 'right' with those values. To me it seems like Boris aimed for values of 1.0 to be the physically correct approximation. For some reason adding more AO and IL makes the effect start to shimmer in some weather conditions.

 

I'm currently toying around with NLA, which is as far as I can tell not a very high contrast ENB.

[Aiyen]

Boris does tend to try to approximate his functions to what is realistic... at least so he says on several occassions. 

 

The materials in skyrim are all a bit wonky due to how the mesh format is setup... the speculars are just weird in most cases, since they where not really made with ENB in mind, and it shows on several of them. 

 

I forgot the main reason why the shimmering appears. Something to do with how they implemented the camera relative to the rest of the matrices used... if I recall correctly. 

 

Anyways, yeah I guess one reason why many people alter the values to extremes is because it is more or less one of the only ways to control shadow intensity. That and perhaps they later mess with the skylighting values as well and forget them.